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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#391

Post by sigmoid10 »

viking123 wrote: post #342
sigmoid10 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only read bad news (i.e. mass news these days since that sells better) this will be the picture. But I have personally seen some insane stuff happen in biotech. Like, I can't believe we're lucky enough to possibly live our life in this kind of future. We already have actual therepeutics developed using Alphafold being tested right now in real clinical trials, but the next generation of stuff that will go into…

Nothing ever happens. See you in 10-30 years when people are still dying of the same shit as today like oesophageal cancer and glioblastoma. Maybe in the next century but by that time you and me both will be under the ground, and no, Amodei's doubling of human lifespan simply won't happen.

[dead]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#392

Post by munksbeer »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #52
vishal_new wrote: post #49

what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third. Scared for the future

If you're famous, you'll be fine. If you're in retiring age, you don't care. Otherwise, good luck! We put ourselves on the street by not protesting what is happening.

I think the general population earning median wages will have very little sympathy for first world software engineers earning vast amounts of money.

What are you going to tell them? Suddenly you're earning what they're earning for sitting at a desk every day?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#394

Post by vessenes »

grey-area wrote: post #378
vessenes wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay hold my beer. both claude and codex running now. EDIT: both agents took about 20 minutes. I used that exact prompt in a clean directory for each, and then said "deploy to netlify" - so a total of two prompts. Codex: https://astounding-bavarois-27b5a2.netlify.app Claude: http://strong-hotteok-91dfb0.netlify.app Netlify is having trouble claiming the Claude project, so if you need a password it's "My-Drop-Site" FY…

Nice, very retro (looking at the codex one)! Claude one doesn't really work (collision detection was the problem I had before too), but fairly close. Yes when I tried previously I had a few gameplay issues in frogger and I couldn't manage to one-shot this sort of thing at the time (a year ago), so last year definitely saw some good progress at this sort of thing. The asteroids game I was very happy with though, had a…

To your point, I didn't even look at the code.. :) Okay, I looked at the codex code. it's super reasonable -- separation of concerns, operating on a state model, it's not over designed. I did not hate it. I also noted that codex put in a CRT simulator loop which is a nice touch.

I think a year ago this would have taken a lot of back and forth and arguing; to me that's kind of the point of Simon's article -- a lot more just 'works' now.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#396

Post by cold_harbor »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

for non-coders: local AI. a couple years ago you needed a dedicated GPU rig. now a 30B model fits on a laptop and runs offline.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#397

Post by troupo »

kvakkefly wrote: post #30
Insanity wrote: post #10

I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

> Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less.

I still must hand hold it every day, as it always does things wrong. Especially after it got seriously nerfed in March.

Note: experiences vary a lot depending on the programming language used, and projects. And the experience of the person coding.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#398

Post by skydhash »

squidbeak wrote: post #321
hollowturtle wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to define hard problems. All I know is that we have a gigantic amount of tech debt we accumulated on the web chasing the next web framework built on top of tons of abstractions with very disappointing native web apis that shouldn't be taken seriously nor the w3c who specified them. And when an Agent it's capable of gluing together a web app with some crud backend with a very rounded corners UI, that…

You insist that AI needs to be able to tackle hard problems, but can't say what qualifies as a hard problem. Can you see the problem with that? If you don't know what a hard problem looks like, how do you know the models can't tackle them?

It’s that it’s to able to tackle hard problems really. It’s because you have to give it the solution, and the patterns to follow, and then monitor it because it will go down weird paths.

If you’ve ever work directly with a user, you know how vague change requests can be. Try writing some vague prompts like that to the agent and see if it can solve them.

For some, writing down a (good?) specs and handing it to an agent is not very productive. Because by then, they already have an idea of the solution and can use the editor to have it done.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#399

Post by gcr »

walthamstow wrote: post #278
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. The problem with being such a naysayer is that you're entirely disconnected from what's going on. You haven't tried an agent like Claude Code and experienced it for yourself, so you don't recognise what it looks like when it's in front of you.

They’re talking past each other. For some, “high quality” is a comment about implementation elegance. For others, “high quality” is about duct-taping crude implementations together to fashion a kickass user experience. To most, quality probably involves some convex combination of these.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#400

Post by malfist »

embedding-shape wrote: post #359
walthamstow wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. The problem with being such a naysayer is that you're entirely disconnected from what's going on. You haven't tried an agent like Claude Code and experienced it for yourself, so you don't recognise what it looks like when it's in front of you.

> Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. That's like blaming the company making hammers because you're unable to build a lasting house with the hammer, it really isn't up to Anthropic, but all about how you use the tool you're holding.

This analogy was trotted out every time someone complained about PHP. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.
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